Honest question: Why use academic design principles instead of SaaS design principles?
Very curious, can you elaborate on these principles? i.e. academic design vs SaaS?
Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
101–110 of 153 posts
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a filesync service such as Dropbox, you can sync state across multiple clients. We have a commercial user doing this. The single transit file won't scale however, so we've started working on a transaction log just as you said. Want to make sure it's pretty robust before deploying, however, as no data loss is the first priority! https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/pull/624 To your second answer, yes and yes…
> The single transit file won't scale however, so we've started working on a transaction log just as you said. Would it be possible to deploy a web-based instance with the server handling storage and collaboration? If so, I might try my hand at packaging it for Sandstorm once that's available. Would make self-hosting Athens super easy for Sandstorm users.
This is my first time hearing of Sandstorm!
Their page https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works writes:
> For example, when using Etherpad – a document editor app – on Sandstorm, every document lives in a separate container, isolated from the others. The front-end and database for that document live in the container. The container has a private filesystem for storage. JavaScript running in the user’s browser can talk only to the document container for which it was loaded, no others. All of this makes up a single “grain”.
Right now Athens works directly with the filesystem (and therefore filesync services), not a REST-ful/HTTP server. I'm not sure how Sandstorm apps "talk to the document container." If they allow read/write access to the filesystem from the web app, it could work, but I'm not sure how Sandstorm works.
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#103> In order to opt-out of analytics, please become a User or Sponsor through OpenCollective. Interesting way to monetize, not sure how I feel about that, but it would be nice if you'd at least list what data you are collecting (or link to your privacy policy/faq/what ever.)
Yup, still thinking about pricing and features. Working on the privacy policy and ToS this week.
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose that's a function of how large the market can be, and how badly it wants to consolidate. 1. Market: If the pie doesn't grow, you may be right. If, however, these become new platforms, with the majority of use cases and user value occurring in the future, then there's certainly room for many existing players to succeed, and for brand new players to. Most people don't even take notes. What if knowledge manage…
You're right on here, but don't underestimate the network effect of Extensions for Roam.
True. Roam Extensions have been poorly managed so far, making it extremely difficult for extension developers to develop and maintain. Maybe that'll change, but an open platform is generally better for innovation.
Another use case that goes beyond individual notetaking is collaborative knowledge management for organizations. So far Roam's collaborative features have been lacking to say the least.
So basically a Github vs Gitlab scenario. Both are extremely valuable companies. One is more for individuals, the other for enterprises. Knowledge management can go broad and deep, and we're only processing and collecting more information. Never underestimate a growing problem/market.
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#105Great job so far. I greatly appreciate that Athens is open source, and it seems that you value potential interoperability and data ownership.
I'm curious about some aspects of the privacy of Athens. Would someone with disk access be able to read my notes? Would you store your banking or personal medical information in there? Standard Notes and others make claims like this (though their featuresets vary).
I'm also hopeful about mobile clients. If this is my second brain, I wouldn't want to leave it at home.
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The single transit file won't scale however, so we've started working on a transaction log just as you said. Would it be possible to deploy a web-based instance with the server handling storage and collaboration? If so, I might try my hand at packaging it for Sandstorm once that's available. Would make self-hosting Athens super easy for Sandstorm users.
This is my first time hearing of Sandstorm! Their page https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works writes: > For example, when using Etherpad – a document editor app – on Sandstorm, every document lives in a separate container, isolated from the others. The front-end and database for that document live in the container. The container has a private filesystem for storage. JavaScript running in the user’s browser can talk only t…
Ah, yeah, it would need to work with an HTTP server for this to work well. Sandstorm has persistent storage on the server side - think server-side code running in a Docker container with client-side JS restricted to communicating with that container on the server. Client-side JS can't interact with the filesystem.
I guess I was assuming that real-time collaboration would eventually involve some sort of synchronization server as a rendezvous point, in which case that would be the natural thing to run on the server side in Sandstorm. That may not be the route you're taking though!
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#107I would love to be able to search math and scientific literature. Do you all support LaTex?
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#108"The problem with notetaking is that we don’t look back at 99% of our notes."
Can you answer why this is the case? Is there a disconnect between what we initially capture (thinking it's valuable) vs what ends up being valuable? Is it too hard to find stuff?
I've tried the graph-based note taking apps like Roam, and while clever, it just didn't click for me, I felt like I would get lost navigating around. Also, Roam is adding so many features that it feels like a messy toolbox rather than a cohesive product, I can't spend the time learning all the doo-dads, I need to do my work.
The ideal notetaking solution for me would be one where I can search and filter it however I want (with saved filters), and easily switch between typed notes and handwritten notes from my ipad (with a means to convert handwritten to typed for searchability and sharing).
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#109I use obsidian right now. I do enjoy the convenience of markdown files, do you have any specific use case where the graph DB would be superior to them? Would it stop scaling at very large notes? Furthermore, the biggest painpoint for me is sync and cross-platform support. I have to use dayone, a journal app on iOS, because the experience (of actually writing thoughts) of any other app is just too inconvenient for rig…
Have you tried using SimpleNote on mobile? The sync to other devices is great and it works on more platforms.
Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research
#110This is pretty cool! I do urge you to take your domain name versus https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/ Could you talk about the clojure part of it? how instrumental was it to build Athens Research. could you have built it on Electron + Typescript for example
We have athensresearch.org and athens-research.com, neither of which I love. We actually do use Electron! ClojureScript compiles to JS at the end of the day. Ultimately Clojure is pretty necessary to use our database, Datascript, a graph db with its own data query language, Datalog. Datalog is a descendant of prolog, and makes recursive/reverse queries trivially easy.
athens.dev is available! (.dev and .app tld are run by Google)